Imalah ’s Reviews > Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption > Status Update

As theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak pointed out in her analysis of sati, the British saw highlighting and then abolishing the practice as part of their civilizing mission in India; they would “save” the native women. In contrast, Hindu men alleged that the women wanted to die. Thus two patriarchal systems, with white men on one side and Brown men on the other, erased the woman and there is “no space in which the

"White colonizers manufactured similar moral panic in response to the practice of “sati,” or as Europeans called it, widow-immolation. (In Sanskrit, “sati” refers to the woman who dies, not the ritual, but because I am primarily referring to European accounts I will use “sati” to mean the ritual.) The rite—which was not strictly a religious practice—involves a Brahmin widow casting herself on her husband’s funeral py

"If my husband, who is of Pakistani origin but had spent his entire life in the United States, were to have killed me, it would automatically have been called an act of “honor killing,” because both of us were Muslim."

Åsne Seierstad, for example, author of the bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul, freely admits that she capitalized on the Afghan cultural formality of offering hospitality and moved into a family’s house to get material for her book, and that she “never mastered Dari,” 29 but it seems she felt completely entitled to represent the innermost thoughts of the women of the family who spoke only that language.